You Don’t Need AI for Laundry; or Why AI is Producing Content

By Joel Silverstein

"I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

Everyone saw this quote on AI misgivings from fantasy author Joanna Maciejewska on social media last week. At first, I empathized, as every marketer has a realistic fear of losing their job to AI.

But I thought about it again – and realized the quote represents a misinterpretation about what AI is, what it's built for and the difference between AI and electronic automation. We already have machines that do our dishes and wash our clothes. We have robots that vacuum and wash our floors and have bowls that feed our pets when we're not home. We have machines that build cars. That's not AI.

It makes sense that AI developers would go after making intangible tasks more efficient, as they've gone after data analysis and consumer recommendations before. Content production and illustration are the tip of a profoundly deep iceberg.

Granted, automation has and will continue to take the jobs of people that once did those tasks. A study by McKinsey in 2018 predicted that 15%, or 400 million jobs, would be replaced by automation by 2030. But those tasks do not require “thinking.”

Alan Turing and His AI Test

Mathematician and computer design pioneer, Alan Turing, is known by many as a founding father of AI. He proposed and AI test, now called the “Turing test,” to decipher whether or not a computer can think. Turing suggested using the “imitation game” to decide a computer could indeed be called sentient. The test would involve a human interviewer asking two subjects, one human and one machine, a series of questions in a set time frame. The interviewer must distinguish between human and computer subject. The computer’s ability to consistently misidentified as human would prove its ability to “think.”

Turing predicted that by the year 2000 an AI “would be able to play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than a 70-percent chance of making the right identification (machine or human) after five minutes of questioning.” We’ve only just started having Turing test discussions about generative AI.

In the past two years, both ChatGPT and Google AI have passed Turing’s threshold of being identified as a computer 70% of the time. Now, of course, scientists are questioning whether the Turing Test is still relevant.

“It doesn’t tell us anything about what the system can do or understand, anything about whether it has established complex inner monologues or can engage in planning over abstract time horizons, which is key to human intelligence,” Mustafa Suleyman, founder of Google-acquired Deep Mind and the author of The Coming Wave told Bloomberg in 2023.

Suleyman went on to describe a new benchmark that may be easier to achieve than artificial general intelligence (AGI). Instead, artificial capable intelligence (ACI) would describe Ais that can “set goals and achieve tasks with minimal human intervention.” Suleyman’s test of ACI would give the bot $100,000 to see if the AI could grow the investment through an e-commerce model business to $1 million. Suleyman said he expected an AI to beat the ACI test within two years.

As of publication, I was unable to find any further evidence of ACI testing.

Generative AI: Not There Yet

A 2013 study published by National Library of Medicine examined the correlation between intelligence and creativity, stating, "the correlation between intelligence and creative potential appears to be moderated by the level of intelligence."

Different publications list ChatGPT's IQ in a range from 83 (Fast Company) to 155 (Scientific American). Can it create usable creative imagery and write in complete sentences? Yes. But it's terrible at research, and often fabricates details and references to suit its narrative. If you're using it for writing without editing and thorough fact-checking, you are putting yourself at risk. That's not to say it won't get better, and ultimately write novels and poems and create works of art to rival the great masters, but it ain't there yet.

So, I don't know, get a dishwasher?

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